1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to an automatic book binder or book binding machine, and more particularly to an automatic book binding machine, in which cut-sheets with a single or double surfaces thereof printed are automatically stacked up and book bound.
2. Brief Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, generally two typical methods, as listed below, are known and practiced for book binding cut-sheets by a binding machine.
(a) Wire-Binding
In accordance with this method, cut-sheets are manually held, one bundle or volume at a time, by a worker while aligning the edges of the cut-sheets with his/her hand and then bound by a wire-binding machine.
(2) Perfect-Binding
In accordance with this method, one or several volumes of cut-sheets are manually aligned at edges and inserted into a machine while manually holding them. Then, an adhesive such as a quick-drying hot melt is applied to the back of the book. After the adhesive is dried, the book is manually taken out of the machine.
Also, automatic methods and machines for automatically binding large volumes of standardized books are practiced.
In the above-mentioned typical book binding methods, the worker usually undertakes the troublesome work for manually aligning the edges of the cut-sheets, manually inserting the cut-sheets into and taking them out of the machine, and the like for each book. In the case of the wire-binding, when the thickness of a book is changed depending on the number of the cut-sheets for each book, a complicated and troublesome adjustment of the machine is required to be made each time. On the other hand, in the case of the perfect-binding, although several books can be bound at a time by applying hot melt adhesive thereto when the thickness of each book is small, they are eventually required to be manually separated into each book. Especially, when the number of cut-sheets for each book is small, this separation work is troublesome and inefficient.
In the last-mentioned automatic method and machine, it is large volumes of standardized books that are book bound, and this method and machine are not suited for the production of a wide variety of books (which are different in content, number of pages, etc.) in small volume for each book.
As mentioned above, according to the conventional techniques, the number of book binding process is large and the book binding work must be done manually. Therefore, efficiency is not good. This tendency is more significant for books which are different in number of pages.
The present invention has been accomplished in view of the above problems inherent in the conventional techniques.